The Romantic Period

The enlightenment occurred shortly before the romantic era. During this time many new scientific principals and technologies were being discovered at a rapid rate, as well as the discovery or rediscovery of many philosophical and political ideas. This led to a sense of revolution on many different levels, political, social, technological and economic. The most well known of these were the political revolutions which occurred during or shortly after this time, the American and French revolutions.

The second significant event occurred as a result of this and was more negative. The industrial revolution was enabled by the scientific progress of the enlightenment. This movement largely operated on the basis of somewhat narrow rationalist principals, namely efficiency, centralization and "progress", which primarily seems to mean economic progress and profit. The sense of humanity and aesthetics were largely sacrificed here.

The life of the common people was degraded during this era. Most skilled workers were unable to compete with the low cost and high production rates of the factories, and were forced to give up their trades and go to the cities to find work. They worked long hours to receive low wages to pay for basic sustenance to allow them to continue to work, life was stale.

The romanticist were against this for obvious reasons. Their poetry is based on intuition and rather than rationalism, an attempt to capture feeling and sensation. According to Williams Wordsworth the poetry came from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, while the poetry itself, as described by Samuel Coleridge, was the “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”.

Nature and pastoral life was another theme of romanticist work. They attempted to express nature not only in the sense of the forest and fields, but in the sense of a return to the natural state of things, which had been imposed on by society. Their Poetic form also reflects this, they tried to use natural expression over classical or formal. Their subject matter reflects this also, much of it is removed from their immediate geography and era.